


The beams of our house are cedar

by eldritcher



Series: Chorale [2]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Dark, Eventual Happy Ending, Friendship, Love, Multi, Rebellion, Self-Discovery, Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-14
Updated: 2020-11-14
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:14:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27548170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eldritcher/pseuds/eldritcher
Summary: Sauron, interrupted.
Relationships: Ar-Pharazôn & Sauron | Mairon, Glorfindel/Sauron | Mairon, Maedhros | Maitimo/Sauron | Mairon
Series: Chorale [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2022304
Comments: 8
Kudos: 17
Collections: The Song of Sunset AU





	The beams of our house are cedar

**Author's Note:**

> Fragments resorted from old drafts into questionable coherence, offered to you as a gift for making it through 2020. Well done :) 
> 
> Notes: First person narration from Sauron. This is dark in places. Please watch your step. We will wind our way to a soft and happy place of possibilities.

I would not have brooked attendance at one of Ingwë's galas if not for the inadvisable and uncontrollable urge to see Laurefindë again. 

The idiot had wormed his way into my bed, with his head of gold and heart of excess. I fancied that he would be done with me in weeks, passing as a butterfly to the next spoil that caught his eye, but I meant to make the most of his infatuation while it lingered. A soft warning in my head spoke forbidding of what I was getting myself into; of my ineptitude when it came to these matters of emotion, and of my lack of defenses to hold course. 

Ambition, I told myself, would shield me from excess, even from an excess of my suddenly desiring heart. It was merely the physical that I found attractive in Laurefindë, in that it had jolted me pleasantly into new knowledge of the pleasures of the flesh. 

That was all. 

"Mairon!" 

I cursed when my lips tugged up despite myself in a welcoming smile, and promptly willed myself to frown at the idiot making his way to me. There was Eonwë nearby, no doubt keeping a sharp eye on the surround for speculation. He had too little to do, in his employment as the errand boy of the Gods, and chose to waste away his time sipping tea and gossiping with Ingwë. 

"You cut a striking picture and I must have you before the night ends," Laurefindë said, pitching his voice soft and yet his words carried. I saw Olórin raise an eyebrow at us, amused. I scowled at him. 

"How was your journey?" I asked the idiot who stood too close to me, fighting not to inhale in the scent of him assaulting my nostrils. There must be a way, I mused, to bottle it up, as a token of bygones once he had finally come to his senses and moved to his next conquest. 

A dark voice teased me that I would be the only wizard he bedded. None of the other Maiar had tastes that ran to the Eldar. They continued as cogs in the wheel of the Iluvatar, sexless and servile. There was Melyanna, but we did not speak of her anymore. 

"I can tell you all about it," Laurefindë breathed, clutching me by the arm, urging me away from the gathering, to the open doors that led to the gardens. "First, let me have you."

"Stay your ardency!" I muttered. And I gave in, when he pushed me into an alcove. 

In my defense, I doubt even one of the Gods could have stayed Laurefindë once his mind was made up. And right then, his mind was made up to press me against a trellis of bougainvilleas and to hitch up my robes and to stick his cock between my thighs. He sighed, in deep satisfaction. 

"Quiet!" I admonished him, embarrassed even if the body was merely a construct shaped to whim and purpose for my kind. He kissed my protests away and used his strong, broad hands to turn me about so that he could mount me right there, in the half-shadows of the alcove, with not a care to who might see or hear my rapidly incoherent mumblings of desire. 

I ran hot with it, as I always did under his touch and mouth, and I hated the sounds I made when he began to whisper endearments and filth into my ears. 

"I cannot have enough of this, of you whining and begging for me. Do you even remember half of what you ask for in these moments, Mairon? I doubt it. You would not be able to meet my eyes afterwards, otherwise. I have to tell you someday. I have to tell you how you arch your back and take me deeper and ask for more. I have to tell you how you suckle my fingers and nestle back into my chest, craving as any wild thing in heat-"

He came, and a distant corner of my mind hated that it was over, even as I winced and tried to shift away from his notions of decency as he made to clean me up. He was an excellent lover and my want for him ran as poison through me. 

"Now let me take you to your bed and love you gently!" He said enthusiastically, and tugged me to my residence, merrily nattering away about this and that. 

I had once watched Aulë mould a pot from clay and wondered if Laurefindë had shaped me to his whims, for I ceded to him happily whenever he placed his hands on me in want. Had Melyanna known of sexual desire? Was I truly the only one among my kind who had fallen prey to these cravings? 

"Stop thinking," Laurefindë said, laughing, and the flash of his hair was golden. Under my curious hand, it was as gossamer; my fingers lingered in an unwitting caress. 

"Have you missed me?" 

I did not reply, taken by how he tilted his head into my fondling. 

"I missed you dearly," he continued, uncaring of my muteness. 

I adored his ability to carry on conversations all by himself, even if I found it most perplexing. I had only used words to a purpose. His ramblings seemed to lack any deliberation and I could not understand the why of it all. 

"What have you been up to?" He asked then. 

It took me several moments to gather my mind from its unravelling, and then I replied honestly, "I laid in beams of cedar to the house."

It had been many days of work. I had toiled to log the wood from the eastern reaches of the Pelori, where it grew aplenty. I had spent many hours in labor to work the wood to form, to smooth perfection, until it formed beams of gold covering me in strength and shelter. I had decidedly refused to think of why I had been drawn to cedar. 

I wondered why I confessed, why I did not fear being seen to the core, to the ugly truth of his utter bewitchment of me. 

Laurefindë, bless him, while perceptive, was not one to look beyond the literal. "I shall have to make your life more exciting then, than it has been!" He declared, and set about to his task with customary adroitness. 

Later, as he slept by my side, I stared up at the beams of cedar, wondered if I rued that he had not seen me to the core. 

It was for the best, I chided myself, and yet I could not cease my caresses of his hair, and of comparing the gold of the grained wood to the gold I held. 

It was too late, I realized. I was not as terrified as I ought to have been, as I stared the truth in its face. 

Perhaps, as Melyanna had done with her pagan Elf-King, I could go to the lands across the sea and rule with Laurefindë. Trading ambition for the hearth did not seem unpleasant, as I held the warm weight of him. 

Was there cedar in the lands beyond the sea? 

\---------

Insistent knocking woke me up. Laurefindë, ever the first to rise among the pair of us, had already arrayed himself in his riding clothes. 

Stay, I wanted to tell him. 

I said nothing. 

"Nolofinwë asked me to accompany the Prince back," he said apologetically, even if I had not said a word. 

He served their house, I told myself. It was his duty to be at their bidding. In sleep, I had dreamed of ruling beside him on Arda. In waking, it seemed a child's folly and yet I clung. 

"Nelyafinwë?" I asked, forcefully turning my mind to the practical. "That boy rides between Valinor and Tirion frequently enough by himself to know every turn and twist of the road. I doubt he needs an escort."

Stay, I willed him, and wondered how anyone tolerated emotions. I wished, often, that he had never come to me. 

"Turkáno," Laurefindë informed me. "He does not know the road yet. Nelyafinwë is staying in the city. He comes and goes, as you say, without an escort." 

There were many of them. I could never keep their names straight in my head. 

Nelyafinwë, I knew, because everyone knew of him. He was their heir, Olórin's precious charge, betrothed to Ingwë's granddaughter. He spent most of his time rooting about the mountains and then stirring unrest in the city with his talk of equality among Gods and the lesser kinds. I scowled. I avoided thinking of his preachings the best I could. Laurefindë's kisses had sufficed to turn me to treacherous thoughts of desertion and elopement to the East, to a woodchopper and a carpenter questing high and low for the right grain of cedar that matched the gold of his hair. When I had built the house, my unravelling mind had toyed with the meaning of home. I did not need a young boy's blasphemy to addle my mind further. 

"Would you terribly mind if I invited the prince in?" Laurefindë asked. "I wish to ascertain that his mount is in good condition before we embark." 

I shrugged, getting out of the bed and dressing for the day. Laurefindë's charges were well-behaved, most of them. Sure enough, when I made my way to the receiving room, I found a boy reading quietly. 

"You must be Turkáno," I noted, relishing the awkwardness with which the boy greeted me. It comforted me to know that there were souls as me, loutish in society's ways, with none of Laurefindë's charming graces. 

"Lord Mairon," he replied, trying to look at me without staring at me, curious as children were. 

How old was he, I wondered? All of this brood seemed children in my eyes, and yet what did I know of them but for Laurefindë's chatter?

"My cousin is outside," he confided. "He allowed me to ride his charger back!" Excitement had threaded into his voice. Then he drooped and said glumly, "Laurefindë will not let us. He said a long journey is not the time for novelty." 

Laurefindë was a stern caretaker. I wondered how that creature of gold and passion in my bed turned to this no-nonsense guardian. Could he- I blushed as I thought of the possibilities if he brought this demeanor to our bed. I had never obeyed, but for the yoke of Eru that all of my kind were bound by. And yet, I was curious, to see how I might take to commands and directions, if it came from Laurefindë. 

My mind, as I noted earlier, was unravelling into a pool of indignity and recklessness. 

"Are you all right?" The boy asked, watching me carefully, concern knit on his innocent brow. 

I nodded and made to open the entry door, to see Laurefindë arguing with the princeling on my stoop about loaning out his mount to his cousin. Laurefindë cut a striking picture, hands on his hips, unyielding and fierce, as he chided his young charge for the recklessness. 

"Lord Mairon!" Nelyafinwë greeted me, embarrassed not a whit to be scolded in my courtyard. 

He was not one to cling to propriety or shame, Eonwe often bemoaned, wailing that Ingwë was throwing away his granddaughter to a mannerless hooligan. 

"Mairon! Tell him to be rid of his ill-advised idea!" Laurefindë demanded, and the tone went directly to my cock. 

"If Laurefindë says you cannot, then you may not," I said, as bidden, and warmth seized me at the approval in Laurefindë's eyes.

Nelyafinwë was not affected by the consensus, his eyes glancing curiously at me. I schooled my expression. He was Olórin's student, and who knew what that wily old monk had taught him to see? Olórin, in turn Nienna's student, had her way of seeing past the flesh to the soul. 

"Your beams are of cedar, and the rafters of cypress," Nelyafinwë said then, and I found myself smiling, despite myself, at his observation, before I frowned, wondering why he had remarked on it. 

"I learned from my mother," he offered mildly. "She is an excellent carpenter."

I knew. Everyone knew. Fëanáro had chosen his wife well, even if she had chosen for herself poorly. 

Laurefindë caved in when little Turkáno came with tears in his eyes and beseeched. He scowled at Nelyafinwë, saw that Turkáno was safely settled on the saddle of the loaned mount, waved at me in parting, and led his charge to the road. 

"You may enter, if you wish," I told Nelyafinwë, who had not made to leave, standing as he did quietly in my courtyard watching the riders fade into the horizon.

That startled him from his musings, and he seemed at a loss. Laurefindë was often cautioning his charges not to approach strangers. I wondered if I had erred. 

I experienced a sense of loss and loneliness whenever Laurefindë left, even if I had existed for eons in content solitude before. It must be that which made me offer an invitation. I had never acted so before. 

Laurefindë, it must be said, had barged in the first time, and every time after, without an invitation. 

"Thank you," the boy finally said, after a few moments of mutual contemplation, freeing me from determining how to withdraw the invitation politely.

There was another moment of confusion, as I debated whether to pour him wine, before shrugging and putting on a pot of tea. The next time Laurefindë came, I decided, I would ask how old his charges were. 

"I hear that Olórin has been teaching you," I said, endeavoring to practice my small-talk, which Laurefindë often claimed was pitiable. 

"Yes," the boy said, and there was a sudden spark of mischief in his eyes. "I must say, Lord Mairon, nothing that he has taught me avails me now, to easily hold discourse with you."

I was amused, despite myself, by his candor. I set aside my pretension of small-talk, and instead asked him what he thought of cedar and cypress. We whiled away an hour or four. 

Though the boy was no smith or carpenter of skill or bent, he had a keen eye for materials and how they blended, a knowing of wood and stone and color and shadow. Perhaps that should have been evident to me from his raiment, which was quite unlike the fashions of Tirion, and yet became him well. 

"One day, I hope to build my home of cypress and cedar too," he said quietly. "In a place by a river in the high hills, where there are fountains in the midst of the vales, beside a still lake that reflects the starless skies. In that wilderness, I will raise a house of cedar and cypress, and the tables will be of elm. My bed shall be of the wood of the olive." 

What was the boy prattling about? 

A still lake that reflected the starless skies? The light of the trees were not from the skies. In those distant lands to the east, there was starlight, as Varda's promise to Melkor. To the west, beyond Nienna's tower, they said the world of Eru's make ended and the primordial chaos reigned.   
  
\-----

The next time I met the boy, he was in my master's keep, crowned and bloodied, a fool come to parley. The Silmarilli of his father glowed resplendent in my master's crown, and the light blazed fierce casting the young king into radiance.

"Now you are defeated," Melkor decreed. "The next time I summon you, you shall come to me broken. Sauron, see to it."

I bowed in obedience. I had once wondered how it might be to be commanded. I loathed it, I found, and carrying out another's bidding tasted like rancid oil at my back of my throat. I respected Melkor. He had never harmed me. He had taught me much of what I knew, of power and craft, of politics and war. And yet, as I beheld the little prince who had once rambled on about cedar and cypress, I wished I was not merely a servant to my master. 

\-------

He was dragged to my feet after days and weeks of endless and inventive torture.

I touched his brow, and sought to take his mind, only to find in it a curious skein of light. I began to pry carefully, as I had once extracted gems from rock at Aulë's bidding. Then I cursed, at the blinding sears when I pressed forward. 

"What is this?" I demanded, holding him by the throat, my fingers strong about his erratic pulse. 

"You are not a fool," he said calmly, with calm someone tortured for weeks had no business exhibiting. His skin hung about him flayed. The stones beneath my feet were stained by the trails of blood from his soles, from his various orifices. His lips were cracked and his voice was a hoarse whisper. When he scrambled to his knees from the prone position that his jailors had dumped him in, I saw that his fingernails were missing, leaving raw flesh. He did not wince. When he looked up, his eyes were the only thing of him I recognized. 

I slapped him sharply, with the full force of my hand, and his eyes flinched shut. I was relieved. He was now merely another of my jobs, merely another thrall to break. I had made a mistake before, in letting him shore up his defenses, because he had cleverly used my burnt out pining for Laurefindë to distract me with. 

He had nothing to save himself with this time. I shored up my mind and conjured a whip.

"I have the Silmarilli, Mairon," he said, boldly raising his hand to where I clasped the handle of the whip, staying my course. 

"Shut up or I will rip your tongue out!" I ordered, fearful of what might overhear him, fearful of his folly reaching my master's ears. 

I should have been the one to take his secret to my master. I could be. And yet, why had the mad fool told me? It was not the pain that had led to his confession. It was not the fear of torture. He was inured to his fate in our dungeons. 

The Silmarilli.

I had suspected it, from what I had seen in his mind. I had suspected it, and yet it was incomprehensible. How could it be? He let go when I swung the whip to his neck, catching ear and collar. He wept, in sheer physical agony, as I continued. 

And at the end, when he had no tears left to shed, when he lay bleeding out to death, I flung the whip away and healed him. 

Many had begun to wonder why I tortured him so only to take away all ailments at the end of a session. It was not my usual fare. I had claimed that it unsettled him more to be healed than to be tortured. Perhaps it was true. I wanted to keep him alive, though I did not know why, though I merely spouted the reasons my master had given me. The prisoner made for an excellent political hostage, in case his family had ideas to attack, Melkor said. His life was useful currency to keep them in line. 

I finished healing him and was about to drag him back to his cell, when he stumbled to his feet, unsteady as a foal, and I hated the knowing in his eyes as he pressed his body to mine. 

"Do that again, and I will leave you to die from whatever they do to you next," I said, hating the reediness in my voice, hating the half-heartedness of my shoving away of him. 

"Use me first," he asked. 

"I have many receptacles, should I require slaking my lust. You are neither appealing nor convenient. The goblins and the balrogs wail that you are poor sport, virgin and ill-trained, squealing like a gutted pig whenever they touch you."

There, that should see to his scheme. 

"You can spell me quiet," he said briskly, as if that were the problem that stood in the way of his folly. "You can spell me tethered down and paralyzed, if that is your preference. You can place a hood on my head and see Laurefindë instead."

The problem, I thought unhappily, was that when I looked at him, I wanted, and I wanted him. I could not bring myself to see Laurefindë in his place, in this dungeon of cruelty and sorcery. No matter the depths of my loneliness and hatred, my hatred for Laurefindë for having unwittedly compelled me to this fate, I could not bide the thought of him harmed. 

This was different, I knew, as I stared at my troublesome prisoner, healed up thanks to my sorcery, just has it had torn him to pieces before. He had been Laurefindë's precious charge once. What would Laurefindë think? What did Laurefindë think? I stayed that course of thought. 

"Why do you want this?" I asked, and immediately wished I had not, for he sensed opportunity in my curiosity. 

There was no place in Melkor's realm for curiosity. It was a crippling weakness that usually ended meeting Gothmog's blade. My prisoner, while altogether foolish, was uncannily perceptive when it came to learning my weaknesses. 

I ought to kill him. I ought to convince Melkor to kill him. I ought to cease healing him. 

"Is it difficult to fathom that I might wish to forget a while, to crave a...less cruel touch from a familiar face?"

"I would be surprised if you can stand the thought of sex after everything we have done to you here," I said darkly, wondering what he was up to. 

He shrugged at that, neither confirming nor protesting, and quickly came to cast his tattered robes away with care, folding them up as if he lived yet under his grandfather's roof. 

"Pretense costs us nothing. I am not Laurefindë, but I am at least of his kind. What shall you have him submit to?"

Nothing. Laurefindë had never submitted to any of my whims, and I was grateful for that. I was not about to tell my delusional prisoner that. Instead, I took quiet pride in the unmarked skin of his body that I had healed intact, and decided I might as well as use him and get these niggling pinpricks of curiosity out of my head. I had an erection, for the first time since leaving Laurefindë in Valinor. How dared he? I wanted to strike him, and instead settled for using him as he demanded.

He did not have an ounce of Laurefindë's skill in pleasuring another. Yet, there was honesty in how he clung to me as I thrust into him, and when he cried they were not tears of pain. While he did not harden, pleasure spoke loud in his breath and touch and gasp. Relief was an obscene picture on his face. I hated us both, that he could find a measure of solace in this, in me. 

"You lack any sophistication or skill to ply trade as a concubine," I said, hating the tremble in my voice. 

"Oh, just as well that I am merely a prisoner who need only suffer and abide." He sighed as I placed my hand on his belly and felt out the starved concavity of it. He shifted, wincing, when I palpated to inspect the state of his kidneys. His health was ruined, irreparably. There were matters even my sorcery could not resolve. 

"Everything I learn about you, I will use to break you," I reminded him.

"I have broken," he said peacefully. It was the truth. What was left in him was merely the light of the Silmarilli. 

"Melkor will never kill you, will never trade you for peace with your family, while you have the Silmarilli. He will keep you so, suspended in torture, until the breaking of time itself."

He did not reply, though when I tracked a finger down his chest, he sighed again in relief, affected by the lack of cruelty in my gesture. Is this what torture's fruit was? To crave a kind touch, even from the torturer? 

I had seen similar behavior in other thralls, where they came begging for my cruelty, but only because they feared the goblins more. They became conditioned to the torturer's bidding, according to Melkor, with examples of positive reinforcement and reward. I scrutinized my prisoner. He was not conditioned, I thought ruefully. He was broken, but he had broken gracefully, deliberately, leaving us with nothing further that could be pried from him. 

"And they said you were the cleverest of them," I muttered. 

His uncle managed to battle us without massive losses to their armies. His father had not been captured. What idiocy had possessed him? I had wondered once. Now I saw the light he had claimed from Melkor, and knew better. Yet, what game did he mean to play? His hand was empty. He would not leave this dungeon alive. Even if he did, even if he returned to his family, what would the light of the Silmarilli avail him? Even the Gods could not wield the light, except for Varda. Even Fëanáro, the craftsman of the gems, the strongest of his kind, had been unable to use them. 

"You mean to barter." 

He did not reply. 

I wished, occasionally, though less frequently than I should have, that he was susceptible to conditioning. 

"They have taken to calling you the maiden king, for how you scream," I remarked, tracing the apple of his slender throat. 

He did not flinch away in fear, lying quiescent. Why would he? Each of us, I believed, had only so much nervous energy to fear and grieve. He must have run out a long time ago.

"I wore my crown to my father's funeral, to my failed parley with your master. I imagine, if I wear it again, it shall only be to cede it to another." 

"I suppose I shall have to call you a prince then," I said wryly, fascinated despite myself, for I had been too lonely for eons to not be allured by even the sparkle of madness. 

"Are you acquainted with many princes?" He queried, as politely as you please, as if he were still under my beams of cedar sipping at my tea. 

"Just the one," I admitted, amused. 

"Well, then I suppose you must find me incomparable."  
  
Flirtation, I realized. I had fallen into flirtation. I had not flirted with Laurefindë. Laurefindë, bless him, curse him, had known what he wanted and had taken it proudly, without flinching, without coquetry. 

I had once found his eyes as grey as charcoal, as river's silt, of little loveliness or allure. Laurefindë's gold and green had rivaled all, and I had paid homage as the light of the Trees had once, as the sun surely must now. In the guts of my master's keep, yoked to his service as a torturer, left with nothing but ambition and spite, I looked at the broken man beneath me, and wondered what his fate would come to. 

\------------

They were fond of taking their sport on him. He made poor game by himself. So they had to turn to more creative, indirect methods. 

There was a woman we had used to keep him obedient in the beginning. She was Elu Thingol's sister, one of my first prisoners, taken at my master's bidding. We had left her unspoiled and noble, waiting for the right juncture to utilize her. 

The prince had little notion of women, of what might be done to them in a dungeon. Melkor knew this. So my master commanded that I use her to bring our prisoner to heel. Melkor was right. The prince gladly submitted to whatever was inflicted on him, if only the woman was spared. His devotion to her protection was so appallingly transparent that even the goblins knew how to exploit the fact.

As time went by, the woman, while inured to her tragedy, began to cherish her chivalrous fellow prisoner. Hope was a bloom that refused to die even in the most fallow of fields. She had known nothing in her life that could give rise to hope, before or after her captivity, and yet she fell prey to the affliction, and her words and touch gentled, as she sought to ease his pain in the ways she knew of. Often, when I came to drag him to the day's agenda of torture, I would chance upon them in their grim nest of tattered rags. She would be holding him to her breast, her embrace protective and nurturing as she sought to shield him from the gaze of others. 

They took perverse pleasure in forcing him to take her, threatening to take his place upon her otherwise. It was darkly amusing and pathetic how she would have to strive to make him harden. He was of the sensitive sort, and less pragmatic than her when it came to the tactical instead of the strategic. 

"She is with child," Melkor told me, quietly pleased, as a scientist would be with a novel experiment.

"His get?" I asked, surprised. 

Certainly, after all that we had done unto him, the starveling's seed should be weak. 

"He is Fëanáro's, after all," Melkor commented. 

Surely my master meant to rid her of the get? I asked carefully, "What shall please you on this matter?" 

"Let him see to it," Melkor said, dismissing the subject. "He is either mad or wise. I wish to see how he reacts."

That night, I could not find my rest in scroll or strategy. I paced restlessly, striving my best to dismiss memories of Laurefindë fussing over his royal charges, memories of how the prince had merrily drunk my tea and spoken of the home he wished to build. 

The Silmarilli would not be wielded, not by Melkor, not by Manwë. Fëanáro had been crafty to ensure that outcome. And yet- 

I swallowed as another rumination took hold of me. And yet, what if Fëanáro had not been merely a hubris-addled fool? I thought of the prince preaching his faith in the equality of Valar and Eldar, of rousing the complacent rabble to riot. 

They blamed Finwë's sons for discord and bloodshed and the doom of Mandos. They blamed my master for all the sorrows that had befallen Valinor that day. Yet, the seeds of it all had been sown long ago, in Varda's fondness for Melkor, in Manwë's determination to put crown above all, in Nienna's and Ulmo's retreats from their siblings, in Nelyafinwë's grim determination to see the yoke of the Valar undone. 

I had thought of rebellion, once or twice, half-heartedly. Perhaps, I had carried it out too, in following my master to the east and becoming his torturer. It was not a rebellion, truthfully. It was only desperation, just as the sons of Finwë had declared vengeance on Melkor in desperation. 

Rebellion, of the sort Nelyafinwë had espoused, was a deliberate beast. I thought of Olórin teaching him, of how the boy had wandered across the plains of Aman, of how he had often been found in the ranges of the Pelori questing around for traces of the primordial that Eru had carven Aman from. I thought of him breaking, under whip and wheel, under coercion and humiliation, until there was nothing left of him but the light of the Silmarilli. 

How had he claimed them?   
  
Did it matter? Melkor would see to it that the child sown in the woman's womb would see to the ending of all these schemes. The prince, despite his detachment when it came to himself, was easily overthrown by harm brought to another. And Melkor suspected, as did I, that when it came to the safety of a child he sired, there would be no rebellion that would survive. 

I was curious to see how he would fare at our next session of torture and healing and ill-advised fucking.

\------

The next time I saw him was in Melkor's audience chamber. I stood to my master's right, and Gothmog to his left. 

"You killed your child. Infanticide," Melkor declared, smug victory in every consonant and vowel he spoke. 

Despite myself, I stared at the prince in shock. He was pallid and trembling, softly broken in a way neither physical nor mental torture had wrought in him.

"Whored yourself to bribe the goblins into bringing her the weeds to kill life within her," Melkor remarked. "I remember you, refusing to receive me in Formenos, with the pride of a crown that did not rest on your head. I remember you raising your eyes to the Gods and exhorting the devoted to give us no due. I remember you defying Mandos, stark a beacon against stolen sails of blood."

"I came to ask for a boon," the prince said then, lifeless and yet fierce in conviction. 

"Let us hear it then," Melkor commented. 

"I wish to cremate the child."

"The goblins can throw it into our gutters, into their cooking fires if you are set upon cremation. Perhaps the dragons, since you are of royal blood after all, even if of a lesser make."

Melkor was toying with him. My fingers were curled tight, and I sought to not let my terror reflect on my face. I was watched closely, by Gothmog. Gothmog wanted me gone. 

"I wish to cremate the child," the prince said carefully. "I hope you may consider my proposal."

"Do go on, High-King."

The title, mocking, made the prince flinch, but he continued doggedly, "I will crawl to you, gladly partake in whatever despoilment you wish me to, mutilate myself as you wish, write to my uncle and family to let them know how you have broken me. Any of it, all of it."

"What a compelling proposal," Melkor said, smiling, and he was a terrifying sight then. I wondered how the prince could behold him without fainting in fear. 

"I have a counter," Melkor continued. "Gothmog, call for an audience about the pen where we hemmed in the most recent batch of thralls for our rites of sorcery. I see that we have an executioner. Give the High-King his sword."

\----- 

Not one came easily to their death. I was used to it. I was used to their screaming and pleading as they were dragged to the altar we had raised for blood sorcery. 

And yet, my inoculation lay stripped as I saw the scene afresh through the prince's eyes. He did not flinch, as they begged and cursed him. He was not Laurefindë, to bravely take on the forces of Melkor in a fight to the death. He wrapped what remained of himself tight as a coil about him, and went about the cull with a detached efficiency that would have made him an excellent torturer should he have set his mind to it. It was the children that nearly ended his will. From the beginning of his captivity, he had little tolerance for harm done to children and time had not eased him.

 _Think of what would be done to them if you fail_ , I entreated him silently, wishing that I could shake sense into him, as he hesitated. My master would not be kind. That was not Melkor's way. All that the prince had yielded would be in vain. It could have been worse. Melkor had not demanded that he write to his family imploring surrender. Melkor had not demanded that he harm the woman. He was getting off easy, even if his hands shook at the horror of his act.  
  
When it was done, Melkor stayed to watch the prince cremate the child. There was no firewood nor swaddling, so the prince wrapped the babe in his rags and then, unhesitating, used the sword made for him by his father to chop off his hair for kindling. As he cast about for scraps of flint, Melkor shook his head and waved his hand, raising a flame of sorcery. 

"What did you name the child?" There was a strange kindness in Melkor's voice, an abatement of hostilities. I had never heard that tone from my master before. 

"Ereinion," the prince replied quietly, faraway, moved beyond grief's expression or articulation. "If I had a son, I knew I would have named him Ereinion."

They stood together, a God and a man, until the flames died to cinders, until Varda's starlight covered them. 

\---------

"Throw him into solitary confinement, into one of the pits. Let him starve and thirst, let him hear no voice nor see a pinprick of light," Melkor ordered afterwards. 

Gothmog laughed, saying, "My master, he will not survive the ordeal. He has not uttered a word since. My servants tell me that grief can kill one of his kind, fade them away."

Melkor looked at us thoughtfully, and said, "He has come too far to give up now. By the end of this, he will be one of us or he will be dead." There was in his words a note of consideration rarely present. 

\------------

Fetching the prince out of his pit after Melkor permitted me was a task of little fulfillment. He said not a word.

"Shall I take you to your cell so that Elerrína may weep over you?" I asked, endeavoring to stir a reaction. "Shall I take you to the goblins for sport? Shall I take you to Gothmog and his merry brood to entertain them this night?"

Then I noticed the blood. He had attempted, poorly, to harm his genitalia, no doubt to prevent begetting a child again. 

I thought of the boys Laurefindë had protected, of the princes and kings Laurefindë had crossed the sea for. 

"I require you for sport tonight," I declared loudly. 

The goblins left us then, respectful of my domain. I fretted, despite myself, at how quietly my prisoner came along. He had never been particularly combative, never had fought tooth and nail, I reminded myself. For the hundredth time, I was glad that it was not Laurefindë in his place. Then again, I mused glumly, if it had been Laurefindë, neither he nor I would have survived to see another day. 

Behind my doors, behind my walls of sorcery that even Melkor could not impede upon undetected, I sat down and began to heal him from his sorry endeavor. He made an abortive movement. 

"If he sees it, he will only become fixated," I told him. "He will heal you, render you unable to harm yourself in this manner, leave you limbless and voiceless, limited to only being a sire. Unless you fancy becoming a stud in his stables, you had best let me see to it."

"Mairon," he beseeched, falling to his knees easily, begging me as he had never begged Melkor or Manwë. "I cannot bury a child again, not even for-" he broke off, into choking sobs, unable to name the task he had set himself. 

So this was what it took, to render him near-insensate in grief, to strip away his secrets and daring, to make him kneel and beg. I shuddered to think what Melkor might have seen in his mind then. 

"I am not a healer," I warned him, and tried to steady my hands in vain, as I broke within his body what was intact, rendering him infertile. 

There was no sign on his flesh, but he screamed silently, throat working in convulsions at the physical pain and the emotional loss. Emasculation, they had called it in Valinor, and it had often been a voluntary rite of passage for the warriors vowed to service. Laurefindë had chosen this, willingly, when he found himself seeking to serve Tirion. He had spoken of his decision with pride. I had not thought deeply upon it, for my kind were not given to parental aspirations (but there was Melyanna, who had ever been the exception that none spoke of). 

This was not Laurefindë's pride in service. This was a grieving man who had wanted children and had no choice but to leave himself infertile, to wage his war. I felt sordid, as if I had done to him a grievous crime, instead of easing his existence. 

"I am not a healer," I muttered again, watching him weep, helpless to do anything but to watch. Perhaps I should strike him, perhaps I should string him to the wheel. Perhaps the physicality of a session of torture would ease his mind. 

He caught hold of his composure then, and croaked, "I thank you."

"I am not a healer," I found myself saying again, clumsy and hating him for unsettling me once more. 

"I needed a surgeon and a scalpel, not a healer and liniment," he said, hawking up for me from some pit unseen an earnest grin. He had lost a few of his teeth in captivity. He should have looked ugly then, I told myself, compared to the perfection of his kind and mine. Instead, he merely was himself, and my cock hardened. 

"Pine," he said, looking at my desk then. 

" _The beams of our house are cedar and the rafters of cypress_ ," I quoted him, from long ago, when he had been a boy in my receiving room sipping at my tea. 

"I doubt cedar and cypress shall agree with your decor," he replied. "I cling to building myself a bed of olive wood still." 

The emotion in his eyes was not cynicism. What was it then? Did it matter, when it spoke to me viscerally? 

Buggering a man whom I had emasculated mere moments ago seemed in poor taste. So I strung him to a cross and lashed him until he bled, then sorted out his wounds and healed intact his flesh, and flung him back to his cell. 

\----------

Enough has been written of his cousin's valiant rescue.

The next time I saw him was after the last battle for Beleriand, when I had fled my master to the dark woods where Ungoliant and her kin lived. The spiders knew I dwelt there, but they had little interest in hunting me down. Melkor knew where I hid, but he feared Ungoliant. 

I had made my abode in a little cave by a brook. I fed myself tubers and cherries. It was a relief to be free from the pressure to partake of meat at Melkor's table. I had not an iota of Eru's goodness in me, but I had never enjoyed meat and the Balrogs had mocked me for being weak. 

I felt the prince before I saw him. 

It had been that way for many ages, after his rescue. The Silmarilli's claim, churning in his blood, had only strengthened with time. Creatures of sorcery, creatures attracted to Eru's light and power, were easily able to pinpoint him, whether they be the Valar or the Maiar of Eru's make or dragons and balrogs of Melkor's make. They spoke of his fell deeds and of the white fire that marked him. Fools, they nursed silly fancies of will overcoming tragedy to explain his recovery. How could they blind to what he had done? 

Melkor believed in the power of blood sacrifice. I had seen enough as his right hand to know he was correct. Finwë, and Fëanáro had gone to their deaths to protect the Flame Imperishable in the Silmarilli. The prince had claimed the jewels as their heir, instead of claiming crown and throne. 

No blood sacrifice was more powerful than that of an innocent. I remembered the pyre in Angband of a babe unborn. That pyre had strengthened the claim. No God could now wrest the claim of the Silmarilli away from where it rested, for what God could sacrifice a child?

They battled, Melkor and Manwë and the peoples of Arda all, to obtain the physical possession of the Silmarilli, unwitting of the claim that had seeped in over the centuries, irrevocable. When Luthien the fair wrested possession of one, Melkor raged and Thingol crowed victory and the Noldor cried in hope. Fools, all of them, and yet the greatest fool I, for I had kept the secret uncoerced, without recompense. Bringing this secret to light would earn me a pardon from Melkor, despite my failings in his service. It would earn me a restoration of honor in Valinor, despite my treacheries. And yet, even though I was at my lowest, without influence or allies, I remained silent. 

_I mean to trick the Gods with fool's gold_ , the wretched prince had once told me, when I had gone to the rocks where he hung to mop wet his parched lips.

\-------------- 

I felt his soul draw near. Had he sensed me too? I doubted it. He was not one of my kind, despite his affinity for the power his father had channeled into stone. 

"Once more, we meet under the cloud of Atalantë," he greeted me cheerfully, coming to stand at the threshold of my cave. He was alone. I could see the marks of a long and perilous journey undertaken on foot through the ravines and the woods. 

"Learned nothing about what happens to the Noldor that are astray in dark forests, did you?" 

It was a low blow. I knew the crevices of his mind. I had seen his grief, repressed, for his cousin lost to Eol and Nan Elmoth. 

"You and I, we are the most wretched of Eru's creations, are we not?" He said, refusing to flinch at my words. 

He was thin, spectral, wasted away more than he had in captivity. Grief had worn him down and all that remained remarkable about him was the fire in his eyes. They had lost the battle for Beleriand. He had cremated his valiant cousin on the battlefield and had only escaped capture because of Hurin's brave defense. In my failure to capture him, Melkor had seen collusion. And then, he had tested me, asking me to throw Elerrína to the goblins. I had killed her myself before that could come to pass, and Melkor had seen treachery. I had escaped before he could harm me, to this cave in a dark forest where only Ungoliant and her children dwelt. 

"I came bearing a gift," he continued, lingering at my threshold. 

"My beams are not of cedar, nor my rafters of cypress," I cautioned him, lapsing into that tired and surreal place of two, of delusion and denial wrapped into an old detente. 

"Just as well," he admitted, stepping over the threshold, joining me. "I doubt my gift cares overmuch for cedar or cypress."

His arm. For most of our acquaintance, including our intimate sessions of torture and relief, I had seen him with all his limbs intact. Often, I wondered if I could have arrived earlier to try and save his limb, for had I not saved the rest again and again, with sorcery?

"Odd, isn't it, that we have not seen each other in centuries upon centuries, and yet it seems as if we had seen each other yesterday," he commented, noticing where my gaze rested. "Nobody looks at me as if I were a curiosity anymore, and I had nearly forgotten."

Liar. He would always be a curiosity to his people and to other races, even after his death. I doubted he was unaware of that. A lack of self-awareness was not one of his vices. 

I wanted to tell him that I had given Elerrína the gift of mercy. Then spite held my tongue. Let him ask. I had lost power and position thanks to the havoc he had played on my emotions, leading me to impulsiveness time and time again. Even for Laurefindë, I had not cast aside ambition so bluntly and without regret. I refused to give the prince more than he had already unwittingly taken. 

"What is your gift? A Silmaril or two?" 

"The complement, perhaps," he said, quixotic and mild, mischief bright in his eyes, as he sat beside me, heedless of dust and mud. Then again, he had not been washed for years while he was enjoying my erstwhile master's hospitality. We had likely worn away his inclinations towards hygiene. 

I opened my palm at his beckoning, regretting how easily the gesture came. He opened his satchel and unearthed something into his palm and brought it to cup over mine.

"A spider?" I demanded, wanting to throw it right back at him. And not any spider. This was one of Ungoliant's get. Ungoliant had wounded Melkor and his pained cries still resounded over those damned plains. The primordial harming irrevocably the make of Eru. 

_The complement_ , the prince had said, and it had been a truth as much as it had been misdirection. The complement to Eru's light. I could feel its power, oily and dangerous. I hoped the creature would not slay me. 

"Remember, even Ungoliant loved Melkor enough to beget Balrogs," my gift-giver said cheerfully. 

"I refuse to procreate with spiders," I replied, and I hated that my tone was light and easy. 

"Well, I would not suggest it. She needs a caretaker. Her mother is ill and I doubt her siblings will make for good guardians. They have a tendency to eat each other. I promised Ungoliant I would see her last child to safety."

"You promised _Ungoliant_ -"

"We know each other from days of old," he said, waving his hand to dismiss it in entirety. "I met her when I was fishing and hunting about the Pelori." 

I could not be blamed for the shock on my visage. The spider on my palm nestled closer, no doubt instinctively reacting to the spike in my pulse. I could see the value, I thought, grudging. Melkor had his creatures. Manwë had his creatures. I was without allies. Ungoliant's get would be a powerful protector, once grown, against the likes of Balrogs and Eagles. 

"You could take the beast, then, if you are on such terms with Ungoliant," I said, waiting for the trap he would spring.

"She would outlive me by millennia, and what manner of guardian would I be then?"

Melkor had poisoned the prince, and broken his mind, and irreparably ruined his health. He clung to life only through Elerrína's sacrifice once, and then thanks to medicines from Melyanna's realm. He spoke the truth. It unsettled me, that I too would outlive him by millennia. I was not unused to loneliness, but it carved sharp into my gut at the realization he was dying. 

"Something to remember you by?" I jested, unwilling to say a word on the matter that gave away my discomfort. 

"A token of gratitude," he said plainly, disconcerting in his honesty. He had changed, I realized. He had never been as blunt before, when it came to speaking of himself. 

What was he grateful for? That I had kept him alive? That I had emasculated him? That I had given him reprieve once or twice when his mind had been scattered to atoms? That I had killed Elerrína? He was grateful, I could tell, for it was etched plainly on his careworn face. How he had changed!

How had Laurefindë changed over the passing of time? I shoved away that course of thought, chiding myself for the folly. 

"Name your token, then," I told him, staving off the burst of unwanted emotion that crept up my throat. 

He lapsed into thought, silent awhile, and I watched him quietly, carving him into my mind. 

"Shelob." 

The spider on my palm stirred, curious. 

"Hardly creative," I remarked. "It merely means spider." 

"Sometimes, Mairon, it is a grace to be called by the names that best mean us," he said simply. 

There was no dearth of meaning in his words, I knew. Only he called me Mairon, from those who had known me in Valinor. Even Laurefindë cursed me as Gorthaur and Sauron. Even Melkor had called me Sauron, after a few years. 

The names that best mean us. I wondered if Mairon was truly the name that best meant the truth of me. I doubted it. I had been an executioner and a torturer for most of my existence. 

"Shelob then?" He queried. 

What was the name that best meant him? They called him Maedhros, in lore and lay. I remembered him shivering, naked and shorn of the mane of red that artists and poets waxed on about, swaddling a babe in hair and rags, standing beside Melkor as he confessed he had wanted to name his son Ereinion. 

He had not been the same man afterwards. Neither had I, even if I had not realized it then. 

"Shelob, then," I acquiesced, and built a nest of twigs and yarn for my new pet. Then I turned to my unwanted visitor and said in the most begrudging tone I could summon, "Stay the night, lest Shelob's siblings eat you. I shall lead you out of the forest tomorrow."

Laurefindë would have laughed away my concern. He was a warrior, unafraid. My visitor was made of a different stock. He nodded and took his heavy overclothes off without fuss. Underneath the mantling, he was thinner than I had initially gleaned. 

Impulsively, I reached for my basket of tubers and berries, and rummaged around until I found the olives I had gathered from the wild woods. 

"I have neither roofs of cedar nor rafters of cypress," I said quietly, pitting the olives, and briskly washing them in the mud pail I had. 

When I turned to offer the flesh, the naked emotion on his face undid me, and despite my rigid self-control, I reached to draw him near. He was biting his cheeks, to rein in his emotions, and his eyes were lustrous as the pearls Aulë had been fond of working with. He came easily into my hold, and trembled in my arms when I traced the lines carven on his brow. 

I had not known if he was of age to be offered wine once. I had been mostly endeavoring to stay in Laurefindë's good graces by charming his charges then. I had seen him starve but for Elerrína's milk. I had been striving to pretend that I saw Laurefindë in him somehow. And here I had him, worn to the soul, on death's threshold, and all I could bring myself to see was merely him. 

If we had not met under the cloud of Atalantë, if we had not been the most wretched of all creations, perhaps we might have been acquaintances on good terms. Perhaps we might have become friends, even if I did not understand the concept of friendship clearly for it was unnatural to my kind, made as the Maiar had been for service. 

He clasped my hand and brought the olives to his mouth. I kissed him then, for the first time, and waited a moment befuddled for he did not seize me closer as Laurefindë would have. Instead, he skimmed his lips over mine and withdrew. 

"One day," he said, "I dream my people shall have strong cities and a bountiful land, and possess houses full of all goods. There shall be wells, vineyards, and oliveyards, and fruit trees in abundance. Of us then, they will say: they ate, and were filled, and became fat, and abounded with delight at their great fortune." 

I supposed even he must have a delusion to cling to. A cause by itself fed neither the belly nor the soul. I brought a hand to the concavity of his stomach, and tracked his ribs up his chest, to his erratic heart. Melkor had weakened even his heart and it was giving in too. 

"I am not a healer," I said, this time to admit failure.

That was Melyanna, who had had the sense to take herself away from Gods and God-worshippers to her girdled kingdom and pagan king. In Valinor, we had not spoken of her, for she was an outcast. Perhaps, of all of us, only she had been the happy one. Shelob skittered about the cave, restless, and yet stayed within, having the sense to avoid her siblings. 

"I am not Laurefindë, Mairon." 

I looked at the man I held and admitted the truth I had known since the pyre, "I have not looked for him in you, in a very long time." 

His face brightened at my words, and he said charmingly with royal airs affected, "You may have me then." 

"Thank you for the noble dispensation," I said, laughing, and yet wondered how many times he had truly had the chance to offer this without coercion. Shaking the morose thought off, I kissed him and tasted olives. 

Had he been conditioned, in Melkor's dungeons? Had he then clung to me because I had been his kindest captor? Why had he sought me then, here, when I could bring him neither reprieve nor safety? 

"You have scarce had a pet spider for an evening and your head is cluttered inside with cobwebs," he remarked, dragging his nose along my jaw in curiosity. 

"Careful, or I shall not feed you my olives." 

He laughed then, mellow, and boldly dragged his hand along my groin, down to my testicles, insinuating something else altogether. 

"My dear princeling, you were never very good at that, despite all the opportunities you had to practice," I gently ribbed him. He bit me in retaliation for that crude and callous comment, though I knew that he knew I meant no harm by it. 

"It was not my fault that the Balrogs were teaching me to fellate their whips," he complained. 

And various other weaponry. He had never begged, even once, though he had cried in pain whenever it had overcome him. I ran my hand along the marrow of his back, and wondered what he was spun of. 

"I claim no sophistication," he said then. "My mediocrity is on offer, if you wish it."

"Why would I settle for the mediocre when I can have the sublime?" I parried, gripping him by the waist with intention, delighting in his carefree laughter. 

There was a keenness to his gaze and an ease to his brow; it was as if his burdens had fallen away. I realized then that he too had been alone, even amidst family, for how could he hope to have them understand an inkling of what he had done? Love was love, but love was not understanding, as I had learned the hard way from my sorry affair with Laurefindë. 

This flirtation we had between ourselves, even when we had been captive and captor. I had never spoken in bed with Laurefindë, for I had been too overwhelmed by how skilled he had been at taking me apart with hand and mouth and cock. He had endlessly spouted praise and encouragement, which I had taken to as a sunflower to the sun, but I had not replied a single word, insensate as he reduced me to nerve and flesh.

"How shall you have me?" He asked, settling quiescent into my hold, languid, running his hand errant through my hair.

I had occasionally tussled with Laurefindë to decide who took whom, though never in earnest. My strength was that of my kind, and while he was a warrior, if I had wrestled in earnest, I might have harmed him. Besides, he was a delightful lover and I had little to complain despite the unfairness of my odds to be the one to take. 

The prince was the exact opposite, in that he did not even care to pretend that he wanted to take. Even when they had forced him to take Elerrína, he had generally finagled the arrangement of their bodies so that she was astride him, that she controlled their coupling. I thought of Laurefindë again, and of how resentment had crept into me even when I had been happy in our passions, of why he could so easily overwhelm me by sensation to submission.

"Have me instead," I said, contrary. I knew his preference. He had never hidden it. I wanted him to yield. And for him, yielding meant to bestir himself into a position of domination. 

"What a cruel host you are," he complained, amused despite his disinclination, and ceded with good grace when I kissed his words away. 

"You exploited my hospitality to abandon a venomous spider that shall grow into a monster," I pointed out. "I have been a good host, given all that." 

"If you think that my ability to suck cock is mediocre, you shall be flabbergasted by my skill in fucking," he warned me, smile solemn despite the ease in his gaze. "I have not done this before."

"I shan't notice your ineptitude, princeling. My depths have been unplumbed for millennia," I muttered, tweaking his cheeks, before dragging my hands away exasperated at my impulsive gestures. 

His smile gentled, and he said quietly, "If it is what you truly wish, Mairon. I find more pleasure on the other side, as you know."

"You are at my bidding. Remember the spider you smuggled to my abode," I demanded, wondering if he could bring himself to break what must be a set preference. 

"I shall cease the moment you compare me to Laurefindë," he warned me. "He has a reputation as a fine lover." 

I wondered who Laurefindë had taken to bed before me, after me, and could only stir up a paltry amount of spite for all of his lovers. I had him awhile, and I could not bring myself to regret that despite everything that came of it. I silenced the voice in my head that reminded me how the hurt blazed when I heard of Laurefindë naming me accursed. 

"Have you settled on a name, then?" 

"A name?" I asked, perplexed, sitting up to let him remove my robes. 

"I hope you do not mean to call me princeling throughout," he said, exasperated, grinning. "I shall be most displeased."

"The names that mean the best of us," I remembered the words he had spoken to me earlier. "Well, then, what is it to be?" 

He raised an eyebrow at me, patient and determined to let me come to my answer by myself. 

Sindarin was not our tongue, but we were exiles who would not return to the west, he and I. Arda was our homeland. The Edain were now more our kin than those in Valinor were.

"Maedhros," I chose carefully, tasting the name, consonant and vowel, and liking the strength in it on my tongue. 

"You chose the name I wear with most ease these days," he said, laughing, pleased, and his hand came to caress my face once. 

He had been torn between identities, between names of old and the self of now. We were more alike than unlike each other, and it frightened me that I was not unsettled by this fact. 

I went easily when he pressed me down to the ground. There was a care to his gestures, unhidden and unaffected, as he bantered with me while preparing us. He had never been quick to arouse and the novelty of what I had asked for must have unsettled him too, but he seemed to know his body better than he once did, and he took his time to ready himself methodically and patiently, without getting frustrated as Laurefindë or I had whenever our arousal had failed to act upon our whims. Waging a war to depose the Gods, I suspected, had caused trivial fears as a dysfunctional arousal far from his worries. 

"I am stronger than you, and you cannot harm me," I said, finally, grabbing his wrist as he lingered and caressed in places that required little preparation for the act we were ready to embark on. 

"A speck of blood or a wince flashing across your face will see to the death of my arousal," he said plainly, refusing to be put off by my impatience. "After all the hard work I have brought to bear, will you let me throw it away?"

"Hard work?" I laughed, kissing his neck. 

I had a fascination for his neck, from the first time the Balrogs had dragged him in captive and he had stared at Melkor without fear. They had hung him a few times, and fucked him as he struggled to breathe, and I remembered how the apple of his throat had bobbed in desperation. He had not spoken a word of his secrets even then, the bloody-minded creature that he was. 

It pleased me to kiss his bared neck, and to nip at the apple of his throat, and to hear him laugh and protest and squirm. There, then, we too could be happy, if only for a sliver of a moment, before we went on to wage our disparate wars. 

He took me then, and where I had expected tentativeness and a stuttered rhythm, he showed only calm and steadiness. His manner was gentle and relentless, as he cleaved me open to the core and kissed me through the duration of it. I was not overwhelmed and speechless with sensation as I had been in my past experiences. Instead, I found myself clinging to him, whispering demands in his ears, and laughing in pleasure as he obliged, as he gave more and more until I came spilling on his belly without a finger's touch. 

"Very good," he said, and it was different from Laurefindë's glorious praise. The words meant something else, I thought dimly, and reached out with my sorcery to him, letting the familiar blaze of the Silmarilli pulse pain along my nerves. 

"Very good," he said again, and twisted me about, until I was on my stomach, and pushed me to the ground, and took me without mercy, pressing my face into the mud. His hand came to my mouth and stuffed his fingers in. Laurefindë had never done something as crude as this, but I soared on the physicality of it. 

"Brace yourself. Knees apart, more. Pry apart your arse with your hands." His voice was breathless, as he sought to stave his ending off. "Very good! Offer me everything now. You have held yourself long enough. Let me see to you."

I shook my head, and realized that there were tears in my eyes, which were not due to sensation or fear. It was release, of a different kind, and I feared it. As I buckled, reacting, he hushed me and pressed down his weight more. His fingers were deep in my throat, and I could only breath in wet snuffles. 

"Remember that this is what you wanted. You wanted me to be your anchor tonight. Let me."

The strength in his voice should not have surprised me, for did I not know every cadence and tone of his as only a torturer would? 

His mind blazed fierce over mine, whiting out my thoughts entirely, demanding surrender, and I obeyed, and I let him.

I had an anchor, I realized, as I floated back to awareness. I had an anchor that held me as I wept for everything, for Laurefindë and for me, for Melkor and for Manwë, for the ruins of ambition and for the follies of hope, for Elerrína, for the pyre in Angband, and for the anchor that moored me to myself. 

\---------------------

In the morning, he woke to find me watching him. 

"To our wars, now," I said, awkward, wondering however he had found the wherewithal to banter with his torturer through captivity and after. 

"I have a war, you have Shelob," he commented wryly, stretching himself as if this were commonplace, and loss seized my heart. 

When I had bedded Laurefindë for the last time, I had not known then it would be our final tryst. I bent to kiss Maedhros. 

"How are you? You slept deeply yesterday night, and I hesitated to wake you to see if you were comfortable." 

I mulled over it. When I had woken, I had seen that I was crumpled about him, clinging as ivy to a trellis, and I had tasted salt on my lips. Embarrassed, I bent to nip at his throat. He bared his neck to my lips and teeth without a flinch. 

"You shall have to follow through if you carry on so," he warned me, spreading his legs in invitation. 

I had only Shelob to make demands on my time. I doubted that Maedhros would linger if he needed to be elsewhere in urgency. I took him up on his invite. 

I found myself etching into my mind how naked his pleasure was as he matched my rhythm. Afterwards, when he let me fuss over him, I remarked, "It is as well you did not marry. I doubt any woman would have tolerated your passivity."

"There are many women who delight in taking men down a peg," he said, yawning, unruffled by my comments. "I would have contrived to marry one of those, and delightedly let them plunder and ravish me for the rest of our lives."

He had me there. It was exactly the arrangement he would connive himself into. 

"I meant what I said."

I knew what he referred to. Sighing, I replied, "I have a war to return to. I must pick either Manwë or Melkor. All of us must, in the end."

He raised a lazy eyebrow. 

I bit his arm where it was maimed. He stared at me in incredulity before breaking into laughter. 

"My family tends to sigh and weep over that," he remarked, letting me nearer so that I could nip and suckle more at the stump. "You are outrageously inappropriate."

"As I meant to say, before I became preoccupied with this charming new feature of yours, you are a peculiarity in our world. The rest of us must pick Manwë or Melkor. I have made my choice."

"You have, indeed," he said peaceably. "It is not a choice I would have recommended, but I am grateful nevertheless."

Later, as he made to depart at the periphery of the forest, he turned back to me once, and winked, and declared, "You made your choice long ago, Mairon."

I realized what he meant, then. Little wonder he had been in an odd mood earlier. 

"Away with you," I ordered, and scooped him into my arms once more, holding him, heart and all. 

Afterwards, once he had vanished beyond the valleys, I returned into the dark cave where Shelob waited for me. 

Laurefindë had set the course of my destiny, subverting my ambitions. I had known it then, and had submitted teeth clashing and begrudging. Years later, I had watched a man by a pyre, and the course of my destiny had changed again, silently, and I had not noticed. Why would I have noticed? I had been his torturer, not his guardian; that had been the only portion of the truth I had accepted. 

He had clung to his delusions. Perhaps I could cling to one too. 

_If we meet again, it shall be under my roof, under beams of cedar and rafters of cypress, and the doors shall be of olive._

In my cave, the pits of the olives I had fed him mocked me. 

\------------------

I was taken captive, by Ar-Pharazôn, the Golden King of Numenor. 

And in imprisonment, I began to learn what friendship meant, for the King became my friend, my ally, my confidante. He had little he feared and the warnings of his people did not leave him shaken. 

We amassed power in great temples with sorcery and magic. He stood beside me, strong and sure, and I realized what having an ally truly meant. Aulë had only seen me as a servant. Melkor had wanted me for his purpose, even if he had tutored me more than anyone else had. 

The attachment of the captive to the captor had fascinated me once, when I had been a prince's torturer. As I learned to trust Ar-Pharazôn's resolve, I began to wonder if this was the same phenomenon. Ar-Pharazôn believed in the supremacy of merit. He believed that the end justified the means, when the end was an ambition bolder than any that had come before. He wanted to overthrow the Gods and he did not care what traditions he ruptured in his journey there. He reminded me of Laurefindë, with his fierceness of heart and strength of will. He had the same spirit, of all or nothing, of living by his convictions. 

I wondered, if he had been unmarried when he had taken me prisoner, if he might have taken me to bed as Laurefindë had. I would have gone gladly. He was married to a woman he coveted and loved, and he never cast a glance of want my way. So I settled for everything else, for his power beside me, for his armies, for his courage and friendship. 

His wife was fond of lore. Míriel, she was called. _The names that mean us the best_. I had met Fëanáro's mother once, in the gardens of Irmo, as she laid down her life for her son. She had not the beauty of many women of her kind, but her soul had blazed that day, with the light of Eru. 

Pharazôn's wife disliked me. I did not blame her for her coldness. I had encouraged her husband's ambitions to take their people to a war that would end in destruction if they were defeated. She looked down upon sorcery and blood magic, and I suspected she was plotting with her husband's opponents to stage a bloodless coup. 

I often came across her reading Elros's journals. Elros had written at length about his protectors, about the brothers who had taken Elrond and him in after the kinslaying at Sirion. I was fond of reading the journals too, to see glimpses of a man who had awoken me to the possibility of success. 

"I knew him," I told her once, as I came across her in the library and saw her immersed in tales of old. 

"Prince Maglor?" She asked, curious despite her distrust of me. 

When they had been Laurefindë's charges, I could not keep their names straight. After warring and slaying them over the centuries, I knew them all. I knew Findaráto, who I had slain in a tower of song. I knew Findekáno, who had walked boldly into Angband to save his cousin. I knew Macalaurë, who had led the armies from the east, through dragonfire, across the bloodied plains to meet his cousins pressing offense on the very gates of Angband. I knew Turkáno, who had refused to desert his city when I had taken it for Melkor with Balrogs and sorcery. 

"How was he?" Tar-Míriel enquired. "The First King writes of him as caring and gentle-mannered in the home." 

I thought of Laurefindë's tales of them, from when they had been children in their grandfather's home. 

"Every war they fought was for their family," I said. "I doubt any of them were unchanged by the end. Grief and defeat change one irrevocably." 

An expression of understanding flickered across Tar-Míriel's face. She had been taken to Ar-Pharazôn's bed after he had killed her father and taken her inheritance. I wondered if that was why she was drawn to the journals of Elros. Was she striving to see if Ar-Pharazôn could change from a captor to a husband? They were family too, just as Elros and Elrond and their captors had been.

"Ar-Pharzon is nothing like any of them," I told her, even if I imagined it must be cold comfort to her. "Defeat turns one rigid and loathe to trust. Ar-Pharazôn has not tasted defeat. You can shape him to be yours, if you choose to." 

She cleared her throat and read in her soft voice. 

> "They took us to a house with doors of olive, and the beams of their roof were of cedar, and the rafters of cypress. The walls were painted in blue and white. 
> 
> "Is this to be our prison then?" Elrond asked. 
> 
> He was brave. He had ever been the brave one, as I would come to realize when we faced the choice of our kind, the choice of Luthien. Then, as children taken from a field of war and kinslaying, we did not fear the choice. We feared only if we were to be hostages or family.
> 
> Maglor cut in before his brother could reply, saying, "This is to be your home." 
> 
> He spoke the truth. 
> 
> When I came to Numenor, I raised my home with a throne of olive. My walls were of blue and eggshell white. The roofs were of cedar and the rafters of cypress. And there was music everyday, in song and flute.   
>    
> 

I closed my eyes as I let her words wash over me. Perhaps that was why Maedhros had placed his family first. Pharazôn's companionship, I began to see, was the first time I had experienced a sense of belonging in a place. 

And then I realized why Melyanna had deserted Valinor, why she had gone elsewhere to find herself a family. The Maiar, our kind, were called to service, and the home and hearth were not our provenance. And yet, the craving lingered in us too. I had been content in my little home in Aman, whenever Laurefindë had lingered there. I was content in Numenor, under Ar-Pharazôn's roof of cedars and cypress. It had become home. 

It was cruel of Eru, to encourage the Valar and the other kinds to find family and build their homes, while yoking the Maiar to service, discouraging us from finding hearth or companionship. Melyanna had rebelled and we had cast her out. 

\-----------------

 _My brother_ , Ar-Pharazôn had called me, before he had embarked on his war-galley. He had embraced me then and I had never known such comfort before, as he bolstered me, with his surety of heart and strength of will. 

Love was love. It was not understanding. I knew that Ar-Pharazôn did not understand me as Maedhros once had. I knew that he did not love me as Laurefindë once had. 

Love was love. It was not acceptance. Ar-Pharazôn was the first to accept me.

I hesitate to imagine the expression I must have worn as he turned away to board his warship, but Tar-Míriel came to me then, and there was understanding on her noble features as she stood beside me.   
  
Together, we watched his armada recede into the distance. 

\------------------

Olórin was now called Gandalf. 

_Let us know each other by the names that best mean us_ , the prince had once told me. He had been the last to call me Mairon, in grace, without resentment or fear. 

Shelob was a comfort, an amusing consolation in my lands of fire as she ate goblins and men of Gondor both. 

Would the prince have broken in Barad-dur? I wondered sometimes, when they tortured the creature called Gollum in the tower. I doubted it. All the fires of Angband's forges and dragons had done little to melt his strength; it was only the first sunbeam over a child's pyre that had nearly undone him in the end. He had clung to his secrets even then, and he had taken them all with him, to the guts of the earth, while Shelob and I waged war with Artanis, his beloved cousin. 

Men pitied me and mocked me, for I was without form and shape; what did they know of the pain of the embodied? I was myself, and I was the power of a Ring. I was myself, and I was in the fires of Mordor. I was myself, and I was the eye of the Tower. 

The Rings of power. I had wanted them made, in the beginning, to mirror the Silmarilli. After Melkor's fall, after the prince had leapt into a chasm and taken his secrets with him, I had faltered. I had found in myself then a rebellion's call. 

The spark of rebellion had been there, even when I had sworn fealty once to Melkor, even when I had sworn fealty to Aulë, but then it had been merely ambition. It had not been a calling then. When had it turned? As most of the changes of self I had experienced, this too had changed when I had watched a prince by a pyre. 

I had seen possibility then, as he stood beside Melkor against a blood sun.

If one of the Eldar, weak as their race was, could hold his secrets and wage war against the Valar, surely I too stood a chance? I had the power, after all. It began with power. All of it began with power. And if I prevailed, I would bring forth a better world, a world where order and craft were valued, where sorcery was not treated as anathema, where arbitrary concepts of morals and virtues would be set aside for a meritocracy instead of heritage and some God's writ. 

I realized that I had never asked Maedhros what he had wanted to build afterwards. I doubted he had thought of it. Maedhros merely meant to get rid of the yoke. Afterwards, no doubt he had been truthful when he had spoken of family and prosperity. His ambition had not extended past his family. He was as Melkor, in wanting sovereignty over self instead of wanting to shape a world. Indeed, if his father had not crossed paths with Melkor, I doubted that he would have even waged war.

He had been an ideologist, not a visionary, not as I was, not as Pharazôn had been. In Numenor, Pharazôn and I had spent many evenings discussing the future of the world we wanted to build.

Pharazôn. If I had seen the dawn of possibility in the acts of Maedhros, I had known the desire of vengeance after Pharazôn's fall. I wanted to destroy them as easily as they had destroyed Pharazôn.

I wanted vengeance. I wanted the Gods cast down, but I was interested in what came afterwards too, in shaping the future. 

Unlike the prince and his convoluted acts of sacrifice to claim the Silmarilli, I had power enough of my own. I merely needed to harness it, as Fëanáro once had, in objects that could contain it. 

I had not accounted for the ego, for the dissolution of my tight rein of control over myself. And I, who had remained centered even in the heyday of my career as a torturer, began to unravel, began to unspool, for I had been too impulsive and had failed to understand that power was not an entity disparate from the self for one of my kind. Fëanáro had been said to turn insane after he had made the Silmarilli. He had used his soul to make them. I made the mistake he had, and paid the price he had paid. I realized what was happening, and I sought desperately for an anchor. 

I sought for an anchor, and found none.

What would the prince think of the Ring? I mused darkly. He would draw comparisons to the Silmarilli, to the power of Ungoliant's venom, and then find a way or nineteen to exploit the knowledge to his advantage. 

I knew, unfortunately, what Laurefindë thought of my pursuits. He had made it clear, and had picked up his sword to defend Imladris from my vileness. His heart was a blade of unassailable courage, and even my Nine cowered away from his attacks. To think that I had agreed to serve Melkor, to ensure Laurefindë's life continued mundane and unaffected by the games of the Gods, and in the end, my decision had turned him into the fiercest of my foes. 

Melkor had fallen; what I had learned from him, of altars of blood magic and sorcery I carried on with in my lands. 

Artanis. Galadriel, the last of the grandchildren of Finwë. She was Melyanna's protege, and she had inherited her cousin's war. She had an adamantine will and the sheer bloody-mindedness that her family was renowned for. She had not been broken yet by their long defeat, since she had been shielded first by Elu and Melyanna, and later by her valiant husband, Celeborn of Doriath. 

Very few had met her, in her hidden kingdom of Lorien. Olórin was now Gandalf, and he rode as her knight, to four corners of the world, and gathered for her allies and informants. 

At her bidding, Gandalf came to me in Dol Guldor, where I had been gathering strength. He recognized me easily, though my powers were distorted by the Ring and I remained disembodied. 

"They sent me across the Sea to bring you to justice," he proclaimed, wizened and wise, hatted and stinking of pipeweed. 

"Running errands?" I mocked him. Then I softened. Anchors. Anchors. "You have the power. Join me. Let us unmake them, for once and for all. It can be done! It can be done! I have seen the possibilities! They are afraid now. They are clamoring to see me defeated to subdue an idea, because enough in the West and the East will now know it can be done!"

I might be defeated, the next who dared might be defeated, but the idea would live on. That is why it was dangerous, that is why the Valar were tightening the yoke around their powerful servants like Gandalf and Saruman. How could they be blind? 

Imagination and independence of thought, it must be said, was not the provenance of my kind. Were we of the same kind, after all that I had seen and lived? We had considered Melyanna alien to us, once. Perhaps I had become as her, by choice and circumstance, a creature of my own distorted kind. _The names that mean us the best_. 

Anchors. Anchors.

"Listen to me!" Gandalf was shouting. "You know there is no way out! Come with me and be judged! They will not be merciless! You cannot win!" 

"I cannot win if they come to battle me. They shall not, not when they can send you on errands, not when they can dangle forgiveness for her kin to the last scion of Finwë as a reward!"

Gandalf, I heard, had been dangling rewards too. He had promised a Ranger the throne of Gondor, as once Melkor had promised Uldor Hithlum, as once Manwë had promised Ingwë a crown eternal by the Cuivenien. As the masters, so the servants. 

"I mean to see you ended, Sauron, foul fiend that you have become!" He declared. 

The power that surged through his soul was stark and beautiful. I wondered why they had appointed Saruman the leader of their merry band of Istari. Gandalf had always been the most powerful and the wisest of our kind, aside from Melyanna and I who had found our strengths and ambitions elsewhere. 

Anchors. 

"Have you heard nothing?" I argued, wishing that I had Saruman's powers of persuasion. "Speak to your Artanis. Speak to her husband. Speak to the Herald in Imladris! They have seen the War of Wrath! They know how shaken the Valar were, as they fought their brother to keep the balance of powers, to keep the status quo. They won that war, but now we know that they can be defeated."

"Eru has willed otherwise!" Gandalf asserted. "It is folly to pursue rebellion. Victory is victory, Sauron. A possibility is not a victory. You know this. You know that you cannot hope to stand against the Valar! Ar-Pharazôn's armada sunk to the bottom of the Sea! The armies of the mighty Noldor and their High-Kings all have perished in vain. You may submit now or you shall be destroyed; that is the will of Manwë." 

He would make no anchor. He would make no ally for my cause. And yet, I consoled myself, there were other Istari. Saruman, though not as powerful, had authority. To him, I would turn next. There were others. The Steward of Gondor was susceptible. Isildur's heir might have Isildur's weakness. There were others. The possibilities had coalesced as my will strengthened. Speaking to Gandalf had only affirmed my decision to wage war. I needed Middle-Earth first, united under my rule, before I took the war to the west. 

"I came to you to convince you to see reason," Gandalf said tiredly. "I have little wish to wage war against you, despite all that you have done, despite all that you have done to-" he cleared his throat. 

To his pupil, to his protege, to his precious princeling he had deserted Nienna for. 

"Where were you when he was held to skin and soul by my powers?" I roared, furious at his silly errand. "Where was your counsel when he made to wage war against the Gods? Where was your power when he faced Melkor? Did you go to him to convince him to see reason?" 

He said nothing and the power of his grief was palpable in the air. He was the strongest force I had seen on Middle Earth beside myself, and he refused to see past his blinders.

"You taught him all that you know, and you forgot to teach the most important lesson of all; that he was not of our make, that his body was not embodied at will. He suffered grievously for it most of his life."  
  
"Who begged Manwë to send the Eagles to his rescue?" Gandalf shouted back at me. "I have strived to protect him as best as I could, within my limitations!"

"There would have been only carrion fodder had I not intervened," I retorted. "To the best of your limitations, you say! You failed him, Gandalf. Striving to drag me to judgement will undo nothing of the past." Then I spoke words of cruel truth. "He cried and called out to you every day, for weeks on end, more than he screamed for his family, before he learned to accept the futility of it."

That silenced him and sent him away. 

In my loneliness, only my Ring of power called to me.

\----------------------------

Gandalf nearly fell to a Balrog. 

I laughed until I cried. Laurefindë had slain many in the battle for Gondolin. He had fallen to one, bravely, defending the retreat. 

They made a great deal of brouhaha over shadow and flame, Saruman and Gandalf both. They carried on so about Smaug in his lonely mountain. I wondered how they might rave if they saw Shelob. 

They had blissfully whiled away their time in Valinor during the first Age and had known little of how Arda had been drenched in steel and blood before the dawn of the Second Age. They had not fought Gothmog or Ungoliant. They had not been Laurefindë standing against the bloodied peaks of Gondolin, alone against an army of monsters. I had heard of the death of Fingon, of how he had fought Gothmog in single combat, of how it had taken treachery to defeat him, of how he had been carven from head to foot by Gothmog's great black blade. I had seen the fierce courage of Luthien who had come to hell, who had gone to death, to save her love. And long ago, I had seen a captive beholding Melkor in his realm, unafraid. 

\----------------------------

Galadriel was not as the Istari who had come to defeat me. She was of Arda, as I was. 

I began to see, too late, that she meant to see me ended at whatever cost, and she was willing to make choices that neither Saruman nor Gandalf could have brought themselves to. 

Manwë had promised her safe passage to Valinor should she defeat me. Manwë had promised her forgiveness for her family and an amelioration of their sentences, to release their souls into the halls of Mandos instead of where they lay trapped in the Void. 

"He lied to you" I told her, through Melyanna's mirror. "He will not keep his word! Your sentence will be to join them, in the Void." 

I sensed her truth then, and laughed. "You think that you can win a war against the Gods in Valinor!"

She shared the same strategy. Uniting Middle-Earth was paramount. She meant to war the Gods after winning the war against me. 

"You could join me!" I exhorted. "You cannot win alone, Galadriel. You have not the power! Perhaps the Istari shall aid you to defeat me. What then? Think you that they will turn against the Valar for you? You have no allies! You have no power!"

"My cousin achieved more with less," she said flatly. 

"You have deluded yourself! There is nothing left of his schemes. His achievement, and I allow that it was significant, was teaching the rest of us that there exists a possibility, should we dare, to unseat the Valar. He was defeated. Ar-Pharazôn tried. He was defeated. All that they have taught us, from Maedhros and Melyanna to Ar-Pharazôn and Luthien, is that the Valar are not omnipotent or omniscient as we once believed."

"You cannot hope to come to a different end, Galadriel, unless you stand with me."  
  
"You slew my brother. You killed my nephew. You-" she laughed. "You have slain more of my family than the Valar have!"

"Hold to your vengeance and you shall lose your true war," I said bluntly. "I shall crown you. I shall spare those left to you still. My war is not with you. End this madness and join me!"

She was not a fool. 

"I want nothing of your foul alliance." She spat. 

"Your cousin would have."

"He didn't, did he?" She said, mocking. "If he had, he would have taken you into his confidence."

"He would not have taken anyone into his confidence," I said dryly. "You forget that I knew him well. You fancy now that you are continuing his war? Such delusions, Galadriel."

"Leave me to my delusions, then," she replied. "Leave me."

The conviction in her I had seen only in Ar-Pharazôn before. She believed. I ceased my arguments and quieted, dwelling on the curiousness. She was not young as Ar-Pharazôn had been, to hold to delusional hope. She had eaten of defeat and war for centuries, just as the rest of us in Arda. What reason had she to believe?

In my distraction, my hold over the mirror weakened, and she flung me out adroitly. 

\-------------------------- 

Restless by what I had gleaned from her, I retreated to my tower and waited for news of the Ring. 

I combed through my memories. I mulled over the journals of the children of Finwë and their descendants. I sought lore and layman's tales. I sent Shelob to the wastelands of old to search for any of Melkor's researches that might have slipped through my fingers after the War of Wrath. I sent spies to Umbar, to Imladris, to Lindon, to Lorien, to Greenwood, and to the halls of Gondor. 

Through Saruman, I interrogated Gandalf. Through Saruman, I interrogated Gildor, the wanderer. 

Finally, I sent the Nine to seek out Maglor, who was still alive. They found him on the shores, living quietly, lingering as a shade. They reported a strange protection on him. I searched and searched, and found what shielded him: the power of Varda. 

Melkor had ever called Varda the mightiest of the Valar, but I suspected it had been his obsession that had led him to that conclusion. She certainly had been the one who had the most power over him. 

Why did her protection linger on Maglor? What made him special to her? Was she a patron of his music? I doubted it. Where had her protection been when they had been fighting and dying? 

The protection had not existed before Melkor's fall, I was sure. He would have observed it otherwise. He had been attuned to Varda's power and doings as nobody else had been. 

What had changed after Melkor's fall? 

"Gandalf sent the Ring to the Shire, to the Hobbits!", Saruman told me. 

We shared a moment of incredulity at Gandalf's madness. And yet, I realized, it was a stroke of subtle brilliance, to hide it in plain sight in a place where none would look, in a hobbit-hole, with neither armies nor sorceries to guard it. 

Gandalf had been Maedhros's teacher in Valinor. 

"They fell the same day!" I exclaimed then. 

"Lord Sauron?" Saruman queried.

I dismissed him. 

They had fallen the same day. I had seen Maedhros that day, in the camp of the Armies of the West, when he had come to claim the Silmarilli, when I had gone to treat with Eonwe. For a man walking to his death, he had been irrepressibly cheerful. I had put that down to his customary madness, and perhaps to his relief that the end was near. 

And yet, I had thought in passing often, it was unlike him to leave his brother to the Valar. He had held that brother of his the dearest, after all, according to what Elros had written in his journals. 

I realized then what he had done. He had sought Varda's protection for his brother.

What had he given in return? Why had he needed the physical possession of the Silmarilli when he had claimed their power irrevocably long ago? Why had he never used the power of the Silmarilli in a bid to change the tides of his war? 

He had thrown away the last war in Beleriand with poor strategies. He had never made an effort to unify the factions of their people after the Battle of Unnumbered Tears. Indeed, he had merely retreated and waited for the War of Wrath. He had surprised everyone in Melkor's court when he had embarked on kinslaying, to Doriath, and then to Sirion, to retake the Silmarilli. Those tactics had not been in line with the exhaustive profile Melkor had built on him over the centuries. 

I needed to find Galadriel. I stirred restless. As little as the lack of corporal body bothered me, occasionally I wished I had the strength to embody myself, for there were missions that I could not send the Nine to or that I could send Saruman as a proxy for.   
  
Getting into her Mirror was easier this time around. She was weaker than she had been during our last meeting. 

"Begone foul fiend," she muttered, even if she did not set herself to flinging me out of her realm. Weakened as she was, she still could have, with the power of the enchanted woods that she stood in.

"You saw some of it," I told her, knowing that she would understand what I referred to. 

"Now you believe me," she mocked, ungracious in victory as I knew she would be. She was delightfully unpretentious about her vices, and I would have liked her better if she were not so set on defeating me. 

"You saw _some_ of it," I emphasized. 

"What do you want?" 

"Varda's power protects Macalaurë. The prince must have bartered. There is only one soul Varda would have made a barter for."

"For Morgoth!" Galadriel exclaimed, disgusted. 

"Melkor's soul is trapped in the Void too. He has always loved the stars. He has always loved the light. He has always loved Varda. Your cousin took the Silmarilli with him. He means to break Eru's world and the Void with it."

"The Silmarilli are lost to us!" She argued. "One sails in the sky. The other in the depths of the sea. And the last, that he took, is in the guts of the earth." 

"The substance of power and the trappings of it are different, even if at times they can made to work in synchrony." 

My power was of the ring just as it was of my soul. Melyanna's girdle had been of trees just as it was of sorcery. The light of the Trees had been tied to their incorporation just as it had been to Eru's grace. Ungoliant's venom was of the primordial and contained in her body.

Maedhros had needed the physical objects to be staged in the sky and the earth and the sea, to achieve his plan. He had walked to his death after ensuring that. The kinslayings had not been undertaken to placate his brothers. The grim choices he had made began to take on a new meaning. 

There were three. One to break the world we dwelled on. One to break the Void. What did he need the third for? Insurance? I doubted it. 

He had thrown away their lives. He had flung his family to destruction and defeat. He had led his people to carnage. 

_"One day, I dream my people shall have strong cities and a bountiful land, and possess houses full of all goods. There shall be wells, vineyards, and oliveyards, and fruit trees in abundance. Of us then, they will say: they ate, and were filled, and became fat, and abounded with delight at their great fortune."_

"Creation is born of the light of Eru," Galadriel breathed, her thoughts racing along the same course as mine. 

I thought of his truce with Ungoliant. He had been known for his explorations in the Pelori, for his curiosity about the primordial. He had learned from Gandalf, who had in turn learned from Nienna, in that fortress to the utmost west at the edge of the world. 

"He has miscalculated. He cannot hold the Void back and hope to survive. Only Eru can. There is no power, not even in the Silmarilli, that can hope to measure."

"You say you know him," she mocked me. "You did not know him at all, if you think _his_ survival was an end he planned for. He lived for us, not for himself. His resolve to see this through was seconded only by his guilt, for everything he had to do to our family, to our people. The mercy of an ending is the only mercy he would wanted to give himself."

I stilled, shaken by the truth of her words. He had been an example, an example of daring and possibility. I realized I had fallen into the same trap that his family had, that the rest of the world had, in coloring him as a concept instead of seeing the tattered soul beneath. He had been detached from himself, in the duration of our acquaintance, that many had called him closer in kind to the Maiar than to his own. A calling to a higher purpose. 

The flaw of creation was glaring. The Maiar had never been capable of resigning themselves to a higher purpose. Saruman was corruptible. Gandalf was desperate. I had rebelled. Melyanna, before all of us, had sown the seeds with her withdrawal to a distant land. All of us had left our deeded purpose behind. 

Galadriel flung me out of her mirror, content with having had the last word. 

\-------------------------------  
  
The Nine crossed the River Isen. Gandalf and Elrond assembled a fellowship, of Hobbits and Men and Elf and Dwarf and Wizard. A young Elf from Mirkwood, though Elrond had pressed them to send Laurefindë instead. 

The ragtag band betrayed each other and splintered. I thought of the Union of Maedhros and of Unnumbered Tears. Would they never learn? Then again, aside from Galadriel, none of them had wept unnumbered tears in Arda. I thought of what Maedhros might have said of his cousin's stupidity, of his erstwhile mentor's desperation. 

Foreboding and illusion mixed in my mind, as I dreamed of Ar-Pharazôn on the prow of his war-galley waving to Tar-Míriel and I ( _my brother_ , he had said, before parting), I dreamed of a boy I had made tea for underneath roof of cedar and rafters of cypress, I dreamed of Melkor standing beside a pyre, I dreamed of Shelob protecting me from hobbits. 

I dreamed of Laurefindë, of how he had tried to convince me to not travel east, only to follow me there, only to war me for centuries, only to curse my name and declare vengeance once and twice and thrice. We had seen each other again, in Gondolin as he stood between his people and my monsters. I had wept for him after he had fallen. We had seen each other again, when he had been sent back, in Eregion before the city had fallen. Love was love, and when it turned it left only cinders. If I were to be defeated, what would he have left? It was only the spite and vengeance he bore that sustained him. I sustained him. As matters neared an end, as our fates hung in balance, I wondered if I would mourn him again were he to die, were I to win. I wondered if he would mourn me, were Galadriel to win.

Maedhros had never held grudges that I had seen. He had meant to unseat the gods, but it had been an abstract cause to him. He had not been one to curse or declare vengeance when tragedies had befallen him, or to shake his fists at his enemies in fury and grief. Unlike the other thralls and prisoners, he had never made dire threats to his gaolers or torturers. I wondered if his detachment had been a pretence. 

The mirror called me. Galadriel. I wondered what she wanted. Even Saruman did not have the guts to summon me. Galadriel must be desperate. 

"It is too late," I told her. "You rolled your dice. Now see it through."

"It will be over one way or the other in a matter of weeks," she concurred. She was as a shade, reduced to mere skeleton and the shape of a soul. Wasting away, as Míriel once had when she had born her son, as Maedhros had, in his long wait for the end. 

She was not one to introspect or to change course once she had made up her mind. What had led her to summon me then? 

"I want an agreement."

Surely, she was not about to solicit me to spare a life or two that mattered to her? In this world, only I had waged war longer than she had. She knew what war meant. 

"Regardless of who wins," she continued. "Regardless of who wins, one of us must wage war against the Valar." 

It could have been together. It could have been earlier, if only she had not persisted in her folly. I had a winning hand. She knew it. 

The chance of the Ring reaching my lands before I could claim it was nonexistent. Gandalf had failed her when the Fellowship had splintered, when the Hobbits had been lost. Without protectors, they had likely been slaughtered by man or beast. The ring would return to me, for it was my power. Even if another found it, there were none who could wield it. It would claim death after death, seeking, until it returned to me. 

"What are you asking of me, Galadriel?"

"The board is set." 

She referred not to our war, but to the final war. Gandalf did not know what she intended. Saruman did not know what she intended. I doubted anyone did. I had seen only because I had seen her family in Arda.

"Regardless of who wins, the victor stands a chance." 

She spoke the truth. Maedhros would not have gambled his war on us. He would have accounted for all possibilities, for both my victory and my defeat, for both her survival and her death. I hesitated. I had meant to consolidate power on Middle-Earth and to raise a mighty army in time to sail. 

"The armada did not save Ar-Pharazôn. It will not avail you," she said sharply, knowing how my plans leaned. 

"An army is necessary." 

Even as I spoke, I realized it was not. It had never been. The power of the Silmarilli was the light of Eru. The power of the Valar was the light of Eru. 

Regardless of who won on Middle-Earth, Manwë would prepare swiftly to put us down. Speed was of essence. Surprise was of essence. There would be no time to raise an army. 

"The fault line is somewhere in the ranges of the Pelori," I murmured. 

It had to be. He had spent years mapping the region. Melkor had spent years mapping the region. Ungoliant had entered our world from there. 

"All it shall require to begin to set the pieces in motion is one of the Silmarilli."

Earendil would not answer my call. The Silmaril in the sea remained my best hope. I would raise spells to find it. I had the power, if I claimed the Ring. Possibility coalesced. 

Galadriel sighed in relief as she knew my acceptance. 

"I have something to ask in turn," I demanded. 

She was incredulous. I could not blame her. What had she to give me? 

"Eru woke life by the Cuivenien by plucking matter from the light." 

Melkor's private collection of lore had taught me all that I had needed to make a bold speculation. I wondered if the absoluteness of conviction that pervaded me was what Laurefindë and Ar-Pharazôn had known every day of their life. 

"There may be a window, as the power of the Silmarilli is overwhelmed by the primordial chaos, to pluck matter from the light that remains." 

It would not be possible to extract all of him, but it may be possible to extract elements of him. And if it was done by one who knew him, it may, it _may_ be even possible to preserve the core of him. 

It was her turn to be silenced. 

"You have turned insane," she claimed, before taking a deep breath, and saying, "So be it. You know I would do anything if there was the minutest of hope to spare him."

"It shan't come to that," I promised her. "I mean to win. I mean to slaughter all your hobbits and wizards and dwarves and sundry." 

She flung me from her mirror. 

\---------------

Gandalf's strategy, if it could be called that, proved to be successful. The Hobbits reached the heart of Doom, led by the creature called Gollum. They slaughtered Shelob. Grief was a visceral thing, as I remembered the spider cupped in Maedhros's hand when he had come to my cave in the dark forest where Ungoliant and her children had lived. 

I directed the Nine to intercept the Hobbits, but I knew immediately that I was too late, that I had lost the war. 

I had made the same mistake that Melkor had, in focusing on breaking the strength of the Noldor armies. I had made the same mistake Manwë had, in overthrowing Melkor in the War of Wrath. I had defeated the lesser enemy. 

I hoped, for their sake, that Gandalf did not stand against Galadriel in the final war. 

\---------------  
  
The Unmaking of one of the Maiar is a curious thing, I found. The core of me unravelled, weakening and weakening, until all I was was matter that remembered. 

Memories are powerful. They directed the matter to the places remembered, to the people remembered, and time was immaterial to memory. The matter I was returned to Aulë, to Melkor, to my house in which Laurefindë had loved me, to that cave where I had found an anchor in a broken man, to Numenor where a Golden King had called me brother. The matter I was returned to the places and the people where I had mattered. 

I remembered all. Memory was not intelligence. It was a poor proxy, but one nevertheless. I noticed that memories did not abide by the laws of time.

When Laurefindë thought of me, standing alone in his courtyard in the new Aman, a warrior come home to nothing and no-one, the matter I was keened to reach him. He thought of me everyday. He was the only one alive, of all who I had served or loved. 

He thought of me everyday, and the matter I was hung suspended about him.   
  
"Some days, it is as if I can feel you," he said to the silence. The matter I was sought to envelope him, in vain. 

"I am losing my mind. It does not surprise me. I knew, from the first time I raised my sword against you, that you sustained me in hate, as you had once sustained me in love. What is there now that you are gone, now that I have no vessel to place love or hate?"

He had always been more perceptive than anyone had given him credit for. 

He continued, then, speaking to the silence. "My memories of you have become my life's breath."

In my unmaking, there had been many graces, and the kindest had been the inability to feel. Emotions and impulsiveness had undone me again and again. As matter, I could not feel and I was grateful for it. 

\------------------------------------  
  
Another began to think of me, erratically, incompletely. The matter I was felt the pull, but it was weak and uncertain. 

It was weak and uncertain, until it coalesced one day, and then it tugged me in its direction implacably, through the primordial chaos. 

The prince lay languid on his bed of olive, upon sheets of fine white linen, underneath a roof of cedar and rafters of cypress, and the walls were of eggshell white and robin's blue. His eyes were as the pearls of Aulë, still and lustrous, and he reached out his hands to me, as if he could see the matter I was, even though I knew he could not. 

"There you are," he said in greeting, and the softness of his smile would have cut me if I was still capable of feeling. 

"Who are you speaking to?" His brother, the brother he had obtained Varda's protection for, popped his head into the room. 

"To myself. I have fallen in love with my voice," Maedhros replied, to his brother's peals of laughter. His gaze softened further. He may not have fallen in love with his own voice, but he had certainly fallen in love with his brother's. 

Once his brother had left him alone, he turned his attention to the matter I was.

"You must have been haunting Laurefindë," he continued.

He made it sound as if I were a ghost. 

I had been lingering about Laurefindë, because he had been the only one who had remembered, because he thought of me everyday, because his hate and love were the only familiar things I knew anymore, because even though I could not feel anymore, I remembered how I had once felt when he had loved me and held me and hated me and spurned me. 

"I am pleased that you have finally chosen to visit," Maedhros was saying. I had not chosen to visit or not to visit. He had not remembered me! 

"I apologize," he said earnestly then, realization flickering over his features. He sat up in his bed and sighed. "I had lost my memories. Some of them have returned, here and there, erratically. I am afraid I don't remember you in entirety. I remember that you knew me well." 

I realized what Galadriel had done. She had saved the core of him but he had not escaped with his memories intact. That was a stroke of brilliance; lethe suited him. His soul, what little I could discern of it, from my limited manipulation of my matter, was a soft, quiet, content place. 

"There is no power that we can harness to change matter to form and soul," he said apologetically. He had never been slow to come to understanding the physical or the incorporeal. After all, he had wielded matter to both creation and destruction. 

The power of the Silmarilli no longer ran in him. He was merely himself, powerless and content. I realized that I had never seen him truly before. When I had first met in Valinor, he had been frightened for his family and had been girding himself for the war ahead. When I had been his torturer and afterwards, I had rarely seen glimpses of his soul, overwhelmed as all of him had been by the power of the Silmarilli he had claimed, by the calculating control he had always worn over every one of his vulnerabilities. 

_The names that mean us the best_. I wondered what name he had chosen to wear, as truly himself. 

"Russandol," he said, predicting correctly what the matter that lingered over him was curious about. "My uncle's name for me, from birth. Now my family calls me so, all of them." 

His mother had named him Maitimo. His mother's name for him had left him, just as he had never seen his mother again after the kinslaying at Tirion.

Russandol. The name had neither strength nor power. Then again, neither did he anymore. He did not seem as if he minded the loss of all that had once marked him exceptional, the loss of what had once allowed him to cast down gods and rupture worlds and even dare creation. 

Laurefindë had no purpose left to sustain him and that had enfeebled him.   
  
"I have vineyards and oliveyards. I have orchards and barns. I am quite occupied by my pursuits these days."

In Melkor's holdfast, they had laughed at the prince trying to distract himself with vineyards and orchards and animal husbandry in his cold keep at Himring. He had a barren mountain to rule, with neither crown nor throne. So he had diverted his interests elsewhere, or so Melkor's advisors had held. 

"Let me show you," he said. 

He got to his feet, and dressed swiftly. I had seen his body only after it had been broken. He was a lovely thing in the grey of morning's light. There was a lazy sensuality to his ablutions as he readied. He showed little modesty. Then again, he had never held with preconceived notions and taboos. 

"Well, then, off we are to see the lands! As long as I continue thinking of you, I imagine the matter will surround me. I must admit that whenever I considered the unmaking of one of the Maiar or the Valar, the afterwards had not occurred to me. It is quite fascinating that the matter retains memory! Both a gift and a burden, I daresay. Memory is as heavy a mantle to carry as oblivion, or so my uncle holds."

The deliberation he brought was a refreshing change from Laurefindë's grieving summoning in dream and waking. Unlike Laurefindë, Maedhros had not railed at me for all the choices I had made. I wondered what Laurefindë would do should he understand that the matter that surrounded him in grief was mine. The mercy that matter could not feel was one I never overlooked. 

"Russandol! Where are you off to so early? It is not yet your waking time."

Turkáno, the High-King who had refused to desert his fallen city, the boy who had begged Laurefindë to let him ride his cousin's charge home.  
  
"Is everything all right?" 

Findekáno. He had come to Angband with harp and song, with a heart full of courage and resolution. He had stood against Gothmog alone and unafraid. 

"Have you remembered anything?"

Galadriel. Artanis. Straightforward and no-nonsense as she had always been. 

"Only that I promised to speak with one of the goatherds about how to best address the foot-rot that has affected some of our beasts," Maedhros lied merrily. 

Deception, apparently, was not a cloak he had forgotten. Suspicious looks greeted his declaration, but he waved them off and walked outdoors jauntily, taking the matter with him to a land covered by sunless skies, to a land covered in trees and green grass, and winding streams and a great river, and undulating vales and hillocks. I was reminded of Beleriand. Arda had been our homeland. Neither Valinor nor Middle-Earth had touched me as Arda had. 

"I imagine it is modeled on a place I had loved once," he said, once we had ventured past the scrutiny of his family. "There is no snow. There are no oceans. There are no great peaks. Turkáno tells me that Arda and Valinor had all of these. Artanis tells me that Middle-Earth too had many geographical peculiarities that this place does not." 

"Perhaps I shall pick up fishing," he continued. "I shall fish and think of you, so that you may join me if you wish. I must admit that I am usually occupied with the running of the orchards and barns, and in assisting my uncle with administration of our household, and given to infrequent leisure." 

If he was busy as he claimed, why would he then waste his time thinking of me, offering the matter I was the chance to come to him? 

"From the little I gleaned from Turkáno and from Artanis, I imagine Laurefindë is the only one that remembers you. Based on what they told me of that history, and from the glimpses I have remembered, I doubt it is delightful." 

He had seen to the core of things, easily, and I had once thought that his perception was from the power of the Silmarilli, or from the tutoring of Gandalf. How dangerous, I thought, but matter had nothing to fear. How obscene to be known, I thought, and remembered the nakedness of his face when he had clung to me in the dungeons of Angband, and remembered the resoluteness of his hold when he had anchored me in a cave. 

"You may find your respite here, with me, if you desire it," he continued. "I suspect that whatever our association had been never held a candle to your association with Laurefindë. My uncle has a saying, about any port serving in a storm. That is my offer to you."

Any port in a storm. 

The matter I was beheld him. He remembered me in glimpses, even if he had forgotten everything. I had served as his port in a storm, in Angband. Later, much later, he had come to me bearing Shelob, to a cave, seeking me out, compassionate despite his tragedies, and had anchored me. 

Love was love. Love was not acceptance. Love was not understanding. If I had a way to communicate, I would have told him that. 

I would have told him of Ar-Pharazôn, who had called me brother. I would have told him of how his cousin had clung to her faith in him. I would have told him of how Shelob had protected me in the days after the fall of Melkor. 

I would have told him of the day my destiny had changed, when I had watched a man beside Melkor before a pyre and a red dawn, one the other's captive but as close to an equal as any could be. 

I would have told him how his name had become synonymous with possibility, for Galadriel, for Elros, for Gil-Galad, for Gandalf, for me, and for hundreds and thousands who had only heard of his canon from lore and song. Very few would know that he had won, in the end. What did it matter? Everyone, everywhere, would know that he had dared raise his banners against Gods, that if he could, so could they.   
  
He walked on, by riverside and through valleys of flowers. He showed me birds and beasts and mushrooms. He showed me the barns where he bred oxen and goats. He showed me the orchards where he grew apples and peaches. He showed me miles of vineyards. 

Finally, we came to the groves of olives and cedars. The woods were fragrant, I knew, for though matter had no senses, matter saw how his nostrils flared as he inhaled. 

"I remembered Elerrína recently. My brother was displeased, to say the least. He has been keeping a wary watch to see if I remember anything more of those times." 

He sighed. 

"What I remembered of her is no cause for alarm. I remembered how she would sing to me lullabies when I found it hard to sleep, when I found it hard to focus, when I found it hard to believe there was an ending to it all. She taught me her language."

There had been laymen's tales about how the Sindarin he had spoken in Beleriand had been a rustic and unrefined lingo, more characteristic of the early warriors of Elu Thingol's realm. He had learned the language as it had been before court and syntax. 

Elerrína had been Melkor's first prisoner, after I had waylaid her convoy to the west where Elu Thingol had been sending her for the sake of her safety. She had a son that Elu Thingol and Melyanna had raised in Doriath; Oropher, crowned in Greenwood, came to wage war against me in Mordor, and the Nine had killed him. 

"I remember her voice, how it was soft and sweet and kind. I remember she held me in protection." 

I had often suspected, from the little I had seen of their interactions as prisoners, that he had nursed a filial piety towards Elerrína. She had already borne and raised a son before her captivity. She had nursed the prince at her breast, when Melkor had wanted him starved for weeks. Perhaps she had seen him through that confusing lens of boy and man. He had been naive in the beginning, in ways she had never been. 

Nerdanel, his mother, had loved her children, but she was the practical sort and devoted to her forge. After tiring of Fëanáro, she had had little to do with their family. Maedhros was her first-born and had been raised in Tirion as the heir by his grandfather and uncle. He had not had interactions with his parents until they had finally come back to Tirion with a gaggle of children, summoned by Finwë who had tired of separation from his son. Even if Nerdanel had been the maternal sort, I doubted that Maedhros had known that side of her. Little wonder that he had projected elements of pietas onto Elerrína. 

"I have not discussed any of it with my family. I fear it might distress them. It is a relief to be able to speak to you, even if you are matter," he said.

He paused walking through the cedar grove and stretched in the warm day, unselfconscious and content. There were spatters of mud on his clothes from our jaunt. There were leaves in his hair and specks of dust on his face. 

"I hope I shan't offend you," he murmured. "I have wondered if you took me as a bedmate when I was Angband's prisoner." 

A bedmate? 

I had been his torturer. I had strung him to the wheel and lashed him until we were both drenched in his blood. I had stood by as Melkor had broken his mind. I had thrown him to the goblins and the Balrogs whenever Melkor had bidden me to. 

I had emasculated him when he had begged. I had changed when I had seen him standing beside Melkor before a pyre. I had stopped looking for Laurefindë in him then. 

"I cannot ask my family. I have wondered, nevertheless, ever since I realized I could summon the matter you are with mere memories. I suspect that would not be so if our association had been that of acquaintances. The power of the memories must be stronger, I speculate, to draw matter across the primordial vacuum. Otherwise, surely, the trauma that many of my family carry would draw to them the matter that is left of the Gods." 

"There are many in Middle Earth who have hated you fiercely, and the strength of those sentiments should have been enough to draw you to them. You were drawn to Laurefindë, because I suspect there was a soul-deep and mutually acknowledged emotion once."

"Why were you drawn to me?" 

He continued walking. The matter I was followed, drawn to him. It was liberating, I thought to have no reins of control to steer my matter by. I merely existed as the matter. 

He had come to the right conclusions swiftly about how matter transported itself. He had not yet come to the right conclusions as to why my matter had come to him. 

His ignorance of himself had not abandoned him then. He had never truly understood the charisma he commanded in lore and song. He did not have Laurefindë's assurance about his own charms. He did not have Ar-Pharazôn's absolute confidence in himself. It was not insecurity that blinded him. It was naivety. 

It was just as well that I had no way to communicate. 

He ought to learn this lesson all by himself.

He had walked a mile quietly, before he muttered, "Preposterous. Was I given to flights of fancy in the past? I remember little, but I cannot imagine myself a romantic by even the most generous definition of the term." 

He cleared his throat, and headed to sit down beneath a large cypress. Crossing his arms against the tree's bole to soften where his head rested, he looked up through the boughs to the skies and hummed. 

It was one of Elerrina's lullabies. I had sung it to him once, when Melkor had broken his mind in fury when the Vala had gleaned the magnitude of his schemes. Melkor had ordered me to poison him and string him up on the Thangorodrim. The prince had cried and cried and fallen insensate after Melkor had left. 

"Sleep, sleep, happy child,   
You were born when all creation smiled-"

In his voice, it was mellow and light, as summer's rain. When I had sung to him, again and again until night turned to dawn, and again and again until another night turned, until sanity returned to him, my voice had been hoarse and torn, for it had not been a voice suited to lullabies. 

"Findaráto says that there is a strange draw that lures captive to captor," he said thoughtfully. "It might have been so."

That was the plainest answer. 

"And yet-" he said softly. "I cannot imagine, from the little I know of myself, that I was prone to that draw. I find myself to be somewhat devoid of visceral impulsiveness." 

Had his family found him lukewarm? Their passions ran swift. In contrast, he was not one to be stirred quickly to emotion. 

"If this is truly my nature, it can only have been exacerbated in times of challenges. It is possible that a portion of our association was rooted in the draw of the captive to the captor."

He fell silent again, fiddling about with a twig he plucked up from the ground, pensive and restless. 

"The rest was merely ourselves," he admitted quietly, finally, as if confessing. 

There it was. 

Not any port in a storm. We had been each other's ports in storms, once and twice and many times over. We had been more too, willingly. He had not come to my cave in the dark forest because he needed someone to guide him safely past Ungoliant's children. I had not come to him because I needed respite from Laurefindë, not then, and not when I had been more than matter. 

"I shall think of you often. I cannot promise I will remember more. Come to me, should you choose to. I hope you shall."

So be it; he the form and I the memory. 

We watched the twilight together. Then he walked back home, to the bosom of his family. The doors of their house were of olive, and the beams on their roof were of cedar, and the rafters of cypress. I saw him there, with his family, content and powerless and free. 

Then I left him, tugged by Laurefindë's memories. I left him gladly, because I required no respite from Laurefindë: he was the gold and the green and the heart of courage that had first shown me there was more to existence than the purpose given us. 

I would return, though. I would return, and not merely because any port in a storm served. I would return because we had been more to each other willingly. 

We had met under the cloud of Atalantë, as the most wretched of all Eru's creations. We had met again, as matter and lethe, under grey skies lit by neither the sun nor the stars, on a land not of Eru's make. 

It should not have been possible, any of this. 

Maedhros had stated often that progress was merely chains of impossibilities turning possible. 

What was ahead? What was next? What came after? 

The first emotion I felt as matter was curiosity. 

* * *

**Author's Note:**

>   
> Sunset is maintained at a [Dreamwidth repository](https://the-song-of-sunset.dreamwidth.org). It is a set of stories that can be read as standalone or as a full alternate universe.


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